Costa Rica

Saturday, March 29, 2014

Happy Cow

As a blog
meant for new vegans and vegetarians – not just the old-timers – it would
probably be helpful to highlight useful tools at our disposal. The Happy Cow website is one such tool that
my wife and I have used countless times in the past. I seriously don’t know what we’d do without it.

For those
unfamiliar to the site, it’s basically one giant catalogue of restaurants that
serve vegan and/or vegetarian food all over the world. That’s right – all over the world! How cool is that? If you’re a newbie to the vegan world and wondering, “Well, where
can I go since Red Lobster is no longer an option?” this is the place to
visit! It’s super easy to use, too.

The site
lets you enter in a location on its main page and from there you can narrow the
search. Not only can you specify your
search for vegan or vegetarian restaurants, but you can also list veg-friendly
restaurants (omni-restaurants that serve a few vegetarian dishes) and what they
call “stores n’ more” (grocery stores, B&Bs, etc.). The fact that you can list vegetarian
B&Bs is pretty sweet. Since my wife
and I try to travel as much as possible, this feature would come in handy if we
ever needed to use it. Then you just
list the radius you want to travel and more.
Once you’ve completed all the requirements you want to search for, the
results show up on the bottom with a map displaying their locations.

We’ve not
only used it for searching out restaurants in our own area but also for
numerous places we’ve been to on vacation.
We’ve been to Hawaii, Canada, Germany, England, Puerto Rico, and Costa
Rica since going vegan and Happy Cow has listed places for nearly every town
we’ve been to. There have been times
when I’ve worried about traveling to a country because I didn’t think there
would be anything there for us to eat but every time I’ve been surprised at the
amount of results I’ve gotten. And it
doesn’t even seem to matter how remote the town may be, there always seems to
be one veg-friendly place for us to stop at.
And on those rare occasions that no restaurant pops up, we make due at
some generic fast food place like Subway since it seems every country has one
of those.

Now, there
are a few times when a restaurant hasn’t either been there or it’s been closed
down or it was vegetarian when it was supposed to be vegan (or vice
versa). It happens (most recently for a
vegan soul restaurant, Yah’s Cuisine, in Chicago that was closed down when
there was no warning on either Happy Cow or even the main site for Yah’s) but
it mostly happens when we visit a place out in the middle of nowhere and that
usually only happens in foreign countries.
In the States, Canada, and England, we have had good luck using the
site.

Besides the
restaurant listings, the site also has other uses. You can join the site and give reviews and talk in forums with
other vegans/vegetarians (a good way to build support). They also have their own blog and shop. They also list a bunch of different
sub-topics you can search on their site to help old and new vegetarians (like
an ingredients list, animal rights information, travel info, and tips on going
vegan). So, if you haven’t been to the
site, I highly suggest bookmarking it and downloading the mobile app.

Yes, I am
on Happy Cow. However, I haven’t been
on the site for very long so I haven’t reviewed many places. If you want to look me up there, too, then
find me under ‘Ben Reilly’. If you’re a
comic book nerd like me, then you know that is a character in the Spider-Man
comics.

For those
of you who have used the site before, what have your experiences been
like? Has it been a pretty reliable
site for you to use?

Until next
time, keep calm and vegan on!

You can
follow Happy Cow on Twitter at @happycow

You
can also find them on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and a ton of other
places.